The Interactions Between Screen Time, Sleep, and GPA

 Pitzer College








The Interactions Between Screen Time, Sleep, and GPA: 

The Effect on Students









Rhyus Goldman, Mila King, Diane Orozco

Psychological Statistics PSYC 091

Professor Steffanie Guillermo 

December 8, 2023



Introduction

In this study, we set out to explore the relationships between screen time, sleep patterns, academic performance, and university affiliation among 5C students. Our research hypotheses were driven by the surrounding impact of screen time on academic outcomes and the potential interaction between screen time, sleep duration, and institutional differences. Specifically, we hypothesized that students with a higher average screen time per week would exhibit lower GPAs (directional, negative), positing a potential negative influence of longer hours spent on screen engagement on academic achievement. Additionally, we expected that students with lower screen time would report sleeping more hours per week (directional, positive), reflecting a potential trade-off between screen engagement and sleep duration. Furthermore, we explored the hypothesis that Pitzer students would report longer sleep durations compared to non-Pitzer students (directional, positive), considering potential variations in lifestyle and academic demands associated with different institutional affiliations.



Method

Participants in this study comprised of 84 individuals who were surveyed anonymously via a Qualtrics online form. The total group value for each hypothesis ranged depending on if participants left certain responses blank or not. The age range of the participants was 18 to 21 years, and the sample was predominantly composed of individuals identifying as white. Independent variables assessed in the study encompassed average screen time usage per week, categorized as less than 5 hours, 5-10 hours, and more than 10 hours, as well as Pitzer student status (yes/no). Dependent variables included GPA, measured through an open-ended response format, and hours slept per week, also measured through an open-ended response format. Additionally, participants provided information on age (open-ended response), gender identity (categorized as Woman, Man, Gender nonbinary, Other), and race/ethnicity (open-ended response).


Results


Hypothesis 1

The omnibus test with ɑ = 0.05 from a one way analysis of variance was not significant, F(2, 60) = .767 p = .469, η2 = .025. There was no difference between GPAs of students who averaged less than five hours of screen time per week (M = 3.82, SD = .12) than students who spent around five to ten hours per week on screens (M = 3.75, SD = .17), p = .957. Similarly, there was also not a noticeable difference between the GPAs of students who averaged five to ten hours of screen time to week (M = 3.75, SD = .17) to those that spent more than ten hours per week on screens (M = 3.62, SD = .57), p = .630. Lastly, there was not a large difference between students who spent less than 5 hours per week on screens versus those who spent more than ten hours per week on screens, p = .583.  These results are shown in Table 1. 




Hypothesis 2

The omnibus test with ɑ = 0.05 from a one way analysis of variance was not significant, F(2, 64) = 1.062, p = .352,  η2  =  .032.  There was no difference between screen less than five hours time and students who sleep less than five to ten hours (M = 54.00, SD = 6.34) p = .993 with students who averaged more than five hours to ten hours of sleep (M = 53.55, SD = 5.35) p = .567. Students who had more than ten hours of sleep and less than five hours of screen time per week = had slightly higher screen levels than students who get more than ten hours of sleep (M = 50.51, SD = 9.40) p = .451. These results are shown in Table 2. 


Hypothesis 3

Using ɑ = 0.05 for an independent samples t-test, there were no differences in how much sleep a student got per week based on if they were a Pitzer student (M = 52.08, SD = 8.00) or a non-Pitzer student (M = 48.22, SD = 10.66), t(65) = 1.23, p = .203, 95% CI [-2.14, 9.85], r2 = .023. These results are shown in Table 3.



Discussion


We conclude that none of our findings were significant due to the small sample size and self-reported measures of screen time and sleep per week. The potential for reporting bias introduces a level of uncertainty, as participants may not have been entirely truthful in their responses, leading to skewed results. Additionally, inadvertent over or under-reporting of hours spent on each activity further complicates the accuracy of the gathered data. If we were to redo this experiment in the future, we suggest conducting controlled experiments that would allow for a more precise examination of the impact of screen time on academic performance and sleep patterns. By directly measuring screen time and sleep duration, rather than relying on self-reports, researchers can mitigate issues associated with participant honesty and recall accuracy. Furthermore, a larger and more diverse participant pool of applicants would increase the external validity of the results, providing a clearer understanding of the potential relationships between screen time, sleep, and academic outcomes among 5C students. Overall, implementing experimental designs and increasing sample sizes will contribute to more reliable results of the associations between screen time, sleep, and academic performance in the context of 5C students.



Table 1

Means and Standard Deviations for Survey Results

 

Self-reported GPAs

Screen Time

    M    

SD

Less than 5 hours

3.82

.12

5-10 hours

3.75

.17

More than 10 hours

3.62

.57

 

 




Table 2

Means and Standard Deviations for Survey Results

 

Hours Slept

Screen Time

    M    

SD

Less than 5 hours

54.00

6.34

5-10 hours

More than 10 hours

53.55

50.52

5.35

9.40



Table 3

Means and Standard Deviations for Survey Results

 

Hours Slept

Student Body

    M    

SD

Pitzer Student

52.08

8.00

Non-Pitzer Student

48.22

10.66







Figure 1













Figure 2











Figure 3










Reality as Memory on Film

this is my final for my 2023 advanced cinema studies class


Stories We Tell is a piece of cinema in the truest sense. Both art and entertainment, the film captivates its audience with its startling and twisting narrative. Who is being interviewed? Who is Polley’s real father? Who was Diane? Stories We Tell permits its audience to get lost in these questions. However, the film itself does not wish or seek to answer them. Stories We Tell is concerned rather, with the nature of memory, truth, reality, and how trusting, respecting, and documenting such memories on film impacts their very nature. Polley attempts to address these questions by documenting the reality of her mother, Diane, through a democratic approach to reality in which all the memories of those involved in Diane’s life are accepted as the complete truth/reality of Diane despite discrepancies between any specific perceptions or recollections of her existence. Polley, through the rendering of these memories into the mechanically reproducible oral stories that becomes the film Stories We Tell, claims this democratic truth by way of her position to the film as the film’s director and also as the daughter of Diane. She abstracts the message of the film even further, through the use of super-8 footage, to communicate the inherently personal and unique nature of all documentary filmmaking.

Stories We Tell reflects the ideas of Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility both internally, in the movie’s investigation of democratizing constructed reality, and by virtue of its cinematic form. Benjamin details the process in which emotional interpretations of simultaneously occurring realities are expressed by encoding those emotions into objects. These objects become encoded with these emotions through the labor involved in their creation, and through this, become what we understand as art. The plastic art - painting, sculpture, etc. - exists in multiples only when the process of the original is repeated as a manual reproduction; the replica, however, is a different art object entirely. Where the original plastic art interprets and then renders reality through a set of physical/artistic and ideological tools, its replica interprets a rendering of reality and manually reproduces this previously intimately conceived and artistically depicted truth. The replica is a dissociated art object in which the meaning of its structure, though seemingly identical to the original artwork, is changed by the imposition of a secondary experience of reality. 

The photographic art can exist in multiples through a process of technological reproduction. Technological reproduction allows for the imprint of reality in a photograph or a film to exist in the imprint’s exact form an innumerable amount of times in as many times and spaces as desired. However, like the plastic arts, the photographic arts’ imprint of reality is rather a depiction of the process of creating a photographic image. Thus, recipients of photographic and cinematic images do not see concrete reality but an artist’s conditional interpretation of truth. 

The slight discrepancies between an original painting or sculpture and its manually reproduced object remind the viewer of the labor, and thus of the physical and ideological process, of the individual responsible for the replica’s existence. The art object, then, becomes bound with these processes. The recipient of a plastic art’s manual reproduction soon begins to conceive of all art not as depictions of truth but as material expressions of unique and conditional impressions of concrete reality. 

Inversely, mechanical reproduction does not make visible the augmentation of reality inherent in the creation of any artwork. Benjamin writes that “by replicating a work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced” (22). This is why photography and film are often used with fascistic intent. These mediums of pseudorealism (in the Bazinian sense) can manipulate factual material to deceive the viewer into believing that what they witness is truth. This substituting of a mass truth for a unique one is exactly what Polley contends with in Stories We Tell. 

There is a moment in the film in which Micheal, Diane’s ex-husband, recalls her behavior around the house following her cancer diagnosis. Micheal recalls Diane attending to the children, cleaning, and caring for him. This memory of Micheal’s is juxtaposed with that of Diane’s children. In the kids’ memories, the cancer diagnosis left Diane distraught. According to her children, they were left without care and the martial gap between Diane and Micheal seemed wider than ever. When the interviewees/family members of Polley were asked if it seemed like Diane was dying, Micheal responded no, whereas the children not only responded yes but remarked that Diane was keenly aware of that fact. 

The oral recollections of Micheal versus that of the kids are completely inverse of each other. With no way to account for the feelings and experiences of Diane, Stories We Tell accepts both answers as reality. The film does not question the validity of its interviewees’ memories; it knows memory to hold the qualities of manual reproduction, in that memories are formed through their owner’s interpretation of expressions. 

These interviews, however, displace the reality and story of Diane from its medium of memory to the mediums of speech and then cinema. Subsequently, the qualities of such memories, and thus the reality of Diane, are changed. Stories We Tell finds its final form through an “assembl[y of clips] from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the editor” (28). In discarding takes of subjects’ narrations of memories, the editor, Mike Munn, discards some memories themselves. Munn then incorporates his chosen technological reproductions of oral memories into the film’s narrative, which is synonymous with that of Diane, and “in a sense, he establishes [it] as the record” (30). This standard process of editing intervenes with Polley’s/the movie’s goal of a completely democratic reconstruction of Diane through oral history. To accurately investigate the inseparable nature of memory and reality, Polley attempts to make visual this aforementioned process of (re)forming truth through editing and the dislocation of memory from its psychological medium. She does this through the super-8 footage of Rebecca Jenkins, who plays Diane in these sequences of fictionalized archival film-images. 

The super-8 footage depicts no specific individual’s telling of the story of Diane. Rather, the footage mirrors the totalizing impacts that technological reproduction has on democratic truth. These sequences are filmed to resemble home movies, yet they feel distant and unfamiliar. This is due to the audience’s inability to decipher who records these videos. The camera often appears to be omniscient. It is revealed at the end of Stories We Tell that these videos are fictional, or at least that they are not archival. From this post-film standpoint, it might be imagined that the super-8 videos are used to represent the perspective of Polley, whose memories are absent from the movie despite her intimate relationship with Diane. However, this is not the case. These videos depict times and spaces in which it would not have been possible for Polley, or any singular person - even Diane - for that matter, to document.

For example, there is a shot that depicts young Micheal, Diane, and two of their children, who are all portrayed here by actors, running into the ocean. Though it is understood that these images are fictionalized reenactments, an expectation of a filmmaker is present. Even in films with fictional narratives, audiences are more or less aware of the camera's point of view as synonymous with the/a person behind it. The same goes for Stories We Tells’ interviews; the audience might not be consistently conscious that the subjects are speaking to them and Polley. Yet, the viewers understand, especially the contemporary viewer because of the popularity of film and the rise in access to filmmaking, that they are witnessing the impositions of points of view of filmmakers onto subjects. There seems to be no one behind the super-8 camera, no specific point of view represented. Polley would not yet have been born, Diane’s other children would have been with her first ex-husband, and the owners of the memories that orally express this moment are all presented as subjects within the image’s frame. The point of view in which this image has been captured through seems not to exist in this juxtaposition of orated memory and reenactment.

In the film, John, Diane’s son, shares his memory of how happy Diane was to be leaving her family in Toronto to go acting in a play in Montreal. John’s oral expression of Diane’s reality is followed by a reenacted shot of Diane in the dressing room of a theater. Shots of Diane and Harry - the extramarital love and purported biological father of Polley - at bars, dinners, parties, walking down the street, etc. through the super-8 camera are underscored by the recounting of Harry’s memory of him courting Diane and their relationship together. A super-8 image of Micheal leaning against a train window is accompanied by the oration of his memory of going alone, by train, to visit Diane while she was in Montreal. Later, as the film reconfigures itself to give expression to the identity of Polley through the excavation of conditional realities of Diane that are seemingly extremely proximate to concrete reality, the super-8 camera lands upon Polley and Harry having a conversation at a cafe. This is the first time that the analog camera makes an image of Stories We Tell’s subjects, rather than actors who play such people. Polley and Harry’s reenactments of their meeting are joined by the voices of Harry and Polley’s siblings recalling this memory. 

Each of these aforementioned sequences, their omniscience along with the shots’ unwavering framing, unique shakiness, and other cinematic qualities, defies the conditional, the spatial, the temporal, and the physical. Yet it deceives its audience into thinking that it is communicating concrete reality. Polley’s exposure of the reenacted nature of these images then deceives viewers into believing that they witness reality. The super-8 sequences’ positions between or overlayed upon orations of memory seems to equalize the ability to approximate reality of the reenactments and the interviews. If this is true, it is only because the super-8 footage, as juxtaposed with the interviews, exposes a gap between Diane’s concrete reality and Stories We Tell’s documentation of truth/memory. This distance is obvious in the interviews alone but is realized to be much wider when edited into the film with methods of montage.

Within Polley’s film is a hierarchy of reality formed by individual truth’s proximity to concrete reality. Memory, history, reality, an original plastic artwork, and a photo or a film (a technological reproduction) are all truths that are equally distanced from concrete reality. Additionally, each of these truths possesses the capacity to deceive one into believing they are bastions of objectivity, despite subjectivity being inherent to their processes of formation. The reproduction of film/photography is the object itself, however memory/reality/history and plastic arts all undergo manual reproductions in order to find existence outside their original space. The plastic art becomes a replica and the memory/reality, as it is framed within Stories We Tell, becomes expression through oral storytelling. Both the replica and the oral story exist in their specific and particular concrete realities, though these existences are more tangential than uniformly derivative of the original concrete realities that the first derivative (the memory/reality or the original plastic art) documents. From here, the memory which has become a tangential concrete reality as an oral story/interview is captured by Polley’s camera and communicated as Polley’s truth/reality by way of its mechanical reproduction as it is incorporated into the cinematic medium of Stories We Tell. 

 Stories We Tell masterfully constructs Diane’s reality through its acceptance of all of the memories of Diane as synonymous with her reality. The film presents an effective methodology for ways in which reality is constructed and conceived in the social. This commitment to the democratization of truth, however, is at odds with the inherent nature of documentary cinema. Stories We Tell’s method of constructing the reality of Diane would be best utilized in strictly interpersonal modes of communication. However, when the method is brought to film, it is absorbed into two hierarchies: one being the hierarchy of reality formed by individual truth’s proximity to concrete reality, the other being the well known social hierarchy formed by the power a filmmaker has over a film’s subjects. This process supplants, as conceived by Benjamin,  mass/democratic reality, the subject’s memories of Diane, for a unique one, Polley’s interpretations of her subjects’ stories which become realized through her film.

Memory is additionally at odds with documentary cinema because memory possesses an inherent nature of subjectivity to the personal, temporal, and spatial conditions of the person who retains such interpretation of concrete reality. Cinema freezes memory in the time and space in which it is documented. Thus, the inherently subjective nature of memory, one of the reasons why it is such a good way to democratize the conception of reality, is abolished by these particular truths’ confrontation with film. Additionally, in order to document such truth, cinema requires memory to forgo its psychological medium for an oral one, which in turn constructs a tangential concrete reality which is the oral/auditory relaying of memory. Stories We Tell’s camera captures this tangential concrete reality, but it cannot communicate such inaccessible reality to the film’s audience. Within this tangential concrete reality is the truth of Diane, but that too is inaccessible because of its psychological medium. Yet, the film does effectively communicate a reality which is synonymous with Polley’s interpretations of the film’s oral stories. This is a result of the film production hierarchy which positions a film’s audience as more proximate to a director, and thus to the point of view of Polley, than to a film’s subjects, who in this case communicate the reality of Diane through their verbalization of memory.

Throughout the final sequences of Stories We Tell, Polley deliberately exposes the artifice of cinema through the visual exposition of her position behind the super-8 cameras. These moments serve as a meta-commentary on the layered reality constructed within the film. By revealing herself as the orchestrator of these cinematic elements, Polley emphasizes her role in shaping the audience's perception of the various realities presented. The juxtaposition of her behind-the-scenes presence and the film's content underlines the power dynamics inherent in storytelling, shedding light on how filmmakers can influence the audience's interpretation of truth through the manipulation of visual and narrative elements.

Stories We Tell’s intricate interplay between memory, reality, and cinema unravels a profound truth: all documentary cinema inherently becomes a personal narrative. The very nature of memory, bound by subjectivity and temporal conditions, undergoes a transformative process when translated to film. While concrete reality remains perpetually elusive, cinema becomes a medium through which personal truths are expressed and shaped. The power dynamics within documentary filmmaking amplify this personal narrative, emphasizing that the most influential storyteller, the one with the greatest control over the film, guides the audience’s perception of reality. The pursuit of realism in documentary cinema intertwines with the intimate relationship between the filmmaker, their subject, and the elusive nature of truth.

Sky Hopinka is a Poet

 

this is my final for my 2023 intro to comp lit class

Sky Hopinka’s film I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is a practice of liberation and decolonization with, through, and of literature. I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is proof of cinema as a medium of poetry and the ways in which film-poetry can be used to free thought and bodies from marginalization. Hopinka’s film reclaims and restructures Native american identity through a process of dislocating written language from its original medium and/or discipline. This practice centers emotion to actively push towards the liberation of all Indigenous peoples from the totalizing rule of colonialism. I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become foregrounds a confrontation of language with experience and investigates the subsequent impacts on language and literature that comes from this encounter of the mind and the body.

In her 1977 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde writes: “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us… There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves… there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real” (38-9). Lorde posits that our liberation requires self-determination. We must undo the dominant eurocentric modes of history, and thus reframe literature and literary disciplines, to center experience and the body as opposed to the mind. Self-determined identities already exist, yet they have been buried by hegemony and its approach to history and literature. 

We must remind ourselves that much of what we observe, even often what we experience, is a result of intentional thought enacted through violent domination with the goal of upholding the power of whiteness and patriarchy. We must free the seeds of independence from their buried status in constructed environments. This requires a transformation of thought and its documentation that inverts the prevailing notion of ‘I think, therefore I am’ to “I feel, therefore I can be free” (38). Only poetry can do this because of the medium’s emotional and bodily engagement with language. Language has the power to dominate or to liberate. Lorde writes that we must reframe the way  we engage with language and literature in order to excavate the “ancient and hidden… [the] incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling,” and thus reshape/reclaim history and culture (36). It is through poetry, a literary medium that does not aim to explain but to express and reckon with “revelatory distillation[s] of experience,” that we release the hidden but inherent tools of self-determination (37). Lorde’s call for the reconstruction of language and literature through poetry is manifested in Sky Hopinka’s cinematic works.

There is a density to I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become that seems to be a result of the blending of superimpositions of history, academia, ‘science’ upon the emotive, the poetic, the expressive. Language, in Hopinka’s piece, is fused with what is felt rather than used to convey what is noticed. Language in Hopinka’s piece, thus, takes on more than just linguistics and becomes expressions of experiences in the visual as calligrams, found footage, and obscured/abstracted video documentation of nature and humanity, and in the auditory as music, field recordings, and oral performances.

 I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become’s first 28 seconds presents an excerpt of Paul Radin’s 1923 text The Winnebago Tribe. Radin was an anthropologist in the early 20th century. His writings utilized fieldwork and oral stories from Indigenous individuals to facilitate his study of the religious and linguistic practices of Native american communities. The Winnebago Tribe and other anthropological texts produced by Radin were created with the purpose of explaining the ways and states of being of a multiplicity of Indigenous peoples to white america in the colonialist-state’s own terms. These texts reduced Native americans to a monolith which could be engaged through the imagination, but never the body, of white america. Radin robbed Winnebago individuals of their words and time for the intellectual profit and assumed superiority of the white Academic. He turned individuals’ collective tribal identity into a book title, rendering subject into object, rendering the body into the mind. 

Hopinka’s appropriation of Radin’s written language is a reclamation of the speech and bodies of his ancestors. The excerpt of Radin’s academic literature that Hopinka’s film opens with discusses the Winnebago tribe’s conception of death that is in opposition to prevailing american notions of an afterlife. Radin’s text says “it was not the vision of a Road of Perfection to be rewarded by eternal peace and happiness in heaven but… a return to earth.” While these words are the language and thinking of Radin, they are the feelings and experiences of members of the Ho-Chunk Nation - which Hopinka and the Winnebago tribe now belong to. Hopinka re-forms Radin’s writing into a calligram of the Effigy Mounds, translating the anthropological study into a poem. He returns the words of his ancestors to the earth through his poem’s shape which resembles what lies upon the grounds belonging to the Ho-Chunk Nation.

This calligram is underscored by a recorded performance of Sacred Harp, a community singing practice traditional to the rural american south. This audio-visual intersection makes clear Hopinka’s dedication of this film to his community. In an interview with Erin Joyce, Hopinka recalls experiencing frustration upon realizing that all the Native studies courses at american academic institutions were geared towards white students. He explains that I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is in many ways an inversion of the discipline of Native studies so as to “tell stories directly to the Indigenous audiences [that Hopinka] felt were being left out of the conversation.” 

The booming voices of the Sacred Harp singers carry over to the film’s second sequence which features dancers at a Naimuma powwow. The image of the dancers, the sounds of their jingling clothing, and the calls of the powwow emcee are abstracted in Hopinka’s integration of this footage into his film. The footage’s visuals are presented in their negative image, rendered to favor the interpersonal movements of the bodies that make up the powwow’s community. The superimposed swirling colors which seem to resemble the northern lights further abstract and poeticize the footage. The powwow’s audio is absent at this moment but appears later beneath a black screen which features a transcription of the 1940s radio show ‘Hello Americans.’ 

Hopinka takes this singular piece of footage and manipulates it to isolate its medium specific qualities. The singular moment exists as a multiplicity of ideas and experiences when contextualized within his film. The contorted visuals ask viewers to feel rather than observe what they witness. The powwow’s audio beneath the language of ‘Hello Americans’ speaks to the idea that the past is refracted in the present, and that, simultaneously yet inversely, contemporary emotions and experiences form the historical. Here, Hopinka’s cinematic-poetic practices mirror Lorde’s notion that “there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom” (39). Hopinka’s deliberate muddling of video through poetic-dissociative techniques allow his cinema to resemble a dream. From here, the film’s audience, who Hopinka has explicitly stated is primarily his personal as well as (inter)national Indigenous community, is given space to reshape and claim elements of these narratives for intimate and collective self-determination.

The motif of dancing lights is present in the majority of the film subsequent to its introduction in the Naimuma powwow footage. These sequences are punctuated by the body and voice of Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns in the form of an archival recording of a live reading of Burns’ work. Beneath images of dancing lights, Burns is first heard reading her poem Sure, You Can Ask Me a Personal Question. Her image joins her voice shortly after, but is soon absorbed by the return of dancing lights. This piece in its original literary form is about the interpersonal experience of being stereotyped. The piece of literature in the form of audio-visual recorded spoken word that has been incorporated into cinema, however, finds an expansion of meaning through the displacement and relocation of its language into another medium. The same language now speaks to the feeling of existing within historical and/or tactile worlds that used to be intimate and have become foreign through colonialism.

Burns’ image converges with that of the dancing lights as she sings the words “I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own. If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo.” These lyrics are repeated intermittently throughout the movie; they are adopted by the voice of a contemporary artist as well as by written language through the transcription of the Burns’ words which are superimposed on the film’s other visual sequences. Hopinka permits the coexistence of these temporally and/or spatially divided sounds and visuals. The belief that the creation of the present happens through specific actions that (re)shape and (re)claim the past. Hopinka actively embodies this idea through the process and in the document of his film-poem. 

I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is proof of film’s ability to accomplish and transcend literary goals of liberation. Through this film Sky Hopinka emerges as a poet. With this identity he creates a resonant exploration of experienced history. He reclaims Indigenous voice, identity, time, and space as through his art-practice’s alignment with Lorde’s conception that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into ideas, then into more tangible action” (37).




Bibliography:


Hopinka, Sky. “I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become.” Vimeo, Sky Hopinka, 14 May 2016, vimeo.com/166668647. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.


Joyce, Erin. “Sky Hopinka Is Tired of Explaining Everything to Non-Natives.” Hyperallergic, 6 Feb. 2023, hyperallergic.com/798442/sky-hopinka-is-tired-of-explaining-everything-to-non-natives/.


Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif. Crossing Press, 2015.






Personal statement/note: 


In this paper I use terms like We, Our, and Us to reference a collective of people with a shared identity insofar of such identities’ status as marginalized under colonialist and eurocentric systems of being. I use this language not to reduce the multiplicity of identities and individuals that create the collective We to their status of marginalized. I do not use this language to equate my experiences as a white woman to that of Lorde as a Black woman nor to that of Hopinka as a Native man. I rather use this language to call upon a history of violence that makes it necessary to work holistically, targeting the hegemonic roots of domination and centering individuals and histories that (have) face(d) interlocking marginalization, in order to truly free anyone. I also want to acknowledge that I hold a very specific power in writing this essay, in being able to write about these works and identities through what they attempt to reject. This is a contradiction that will always be somewhat present in academic writing from white students about art and expressions from people of color. I hope that my genuine belief in and care about these practices will come through in my paper. I hope I have been able to infuse my analyses and reason that have become writing in a privileged and academic space such as Oberlin with real emotion emanating from what I feel and have felt. In writing this paper, I have constantly confronted the challenge of writing through the personal, and thus acknowledging the specific framework that I have constructed as a result of my identity’s relationship with its temporal and geopolitical context/conditions, and actively centering experiences and perspectives from people of color. I have made the decision to write alternating between the first person and the (distinctly speculative and not omniscient) third person. I choose to write in the first person when discussing Lorde, as she and I share identities that are rooted in gender and sexuality, and also because her language is catering towards a larger and more diverse audience which is clear in her use of the terms We, Us, and Our. I choose to use the third person when writing about Hopinka, as he constantly expresses that his work is not for white audiences. He works through personal meanings and expression and aims to communicate with other Native individuals without having to explain himself or cater to other, more specifically white, identities. I use the third person in these analyses as not to claim his experiences or expressions. I may think that I know them, but I will never be able to feel them, and thus I do not. I have been deliberate and contemplative with my word choice, but I also understand that in coming from my privileged position, as a white student afforded the financial and temporal luxury of engaging with literary analytics at an institution like Oberlin College, I will never be fully aware of the real impacts that my language has, or the ways in which it might misrepresent specific individual or collective identities that I do not hold. I understand that the position from which I write this paper forces my overextension of the conclusion I draw and the simplification of works I write about here. At the same time, I think that it is important to be able to discuss works from artists such as Lorde and Hopinka. I have made a serious attempt to balance analysis, a practice that has its flaws but I believe can be used to aid liberation, and the goal of self-determination of people of color that is independent from whiteness. I acknowledge and understand that because of my identity, the conclusions I draw about art and artists of color inherently clouds the aforementioned goal of total autonomy. I have spent as much time as permitted by the due-date of this assignment thinking about the ways in which I can be analytical through my privileged status as a white american student without repeating and reinforcing the exact practices that the arts/artists I apply analysis towards aim to dismantle. I have decided that my best approach is to use analysis as a means for creating extraliterary questions rather than as a means to draw conclusions. I write all of this, this whole preliminary note, to say that my language and my analyses will be fundamentally misrepresentative in some ways. I hope this paper can be thought of not as drawing conclusions but as a forever malleable working through of art, literature, and history. I invite anyone reading this paper who feels misrepresented to become a contributor to this paper. I hope that I can do justice to the works and even more so to the experiences and feelings that I write about in this paper.


The List

shitposting

  https://youtu.be/xxTjWPCIBu4